It’s fascinating the way history repeats itself. There are certain events that keep happening to us repeatedly, and all we can do is stand by and watch them unfold with a sense of wonder in our eye. In my case, this has happened far too often for it to be a coincidence.

For instance, I belong to the new breed of young (-ish) people who can’t be bothered with archaic things like loyalty to a company. I need excitement and I need to keep moving. If I work for a company longer than two years, something might be seriously wrong with me. Or the work is challenging enough to keep me there. Else, in the past eleven years, I have averaged about 13 months in a particular job. Each time I jump, I do it for the usual reasons – more money, better working conditions and more opportunities to learn something new.

Don’t get me wrong, I love it. I love the unpredictability that comes with this lifestyle. I love the fact that I’m earning at least three times more than what other people I graduated with are earning. But the funny thing about this situation is that I never do this consciously. Invariably, after about 6 months in a company, I feel the first strands of restlessness tugging at me. I start assessing my situation and by the 8th month or so, I would have usually taken the decision to move on.

But this post isn’t about my unusual career paths. It’s about an incident that happened today, which made me stop doing whatever I was doing, sit back and stare at the ceiling in wonder and amazement.

Here’s the bizarre drama: I was dating a girl a while back, let’s call her S. Now, a few months into our relationship, S asked me if she can transfer some money into my bank account because she had lost her ATM card, and she had to pay someone. She asked me to meet the person, withdraw the money and hand it over. A simple, everyday occurrence that most of us experience, right?

Now today, six-seven years later, another girl, who’s a colleague from work, whose name is also S, called me and asked me if she could transfer some money into my account because she had to pay someone and she had lost her ATM card.

The strangeness doesn’t end there:

Both of them transferred the same amount of money.

Both of them had to pay a man with the same name.

Both of them transferred the money to my account in the same bank – HDFC.

I am meeting the man to hand over the money in the same place where I met the earlier man, six-seven years ago – Indiranagar.

I was in the second month of a new job back then. Same here, today.

I had had a wardrobe malfunction back then, having spilled tea on my white shirt, which forced me to change clothes and come to work a bit late . The exact same thing happened this morning. I am not shitting you!

Now, you may want to believe in supernatural forces and karma and coincidences, but I don’t. At least, I won’t admit to it in public. But this is too freaky to ignore.

There’ve been a lot of people who have advised me against using Windows Vista, but so far I’ve been giving them a deaf ear. Yesterday, I realized just how truthful their words were.

My desktop computer is an ancient piece of garbage that belongs in the antiques department of a museum, and unwittingly, I decided to load Windows Vista on it, a few months back. It performed quite well, considering its age and capacity. Vista, being graphic-heavy, soon began to eat into my computer’s memory and yesterday, the damn thing just refused to boot. No matter how much I tried, it gave up and I could almost hear it scream for mercy. Being a kind-hearted guy, I decided to heed and made up my mind to switch back to XP. It was a simple task – remove Vista, install XP, be happy. But, being God’s yo-yo has its own perks and I soon myself in a rut.

I went to friend’s place where he gave a couple of XP installation CDs. I plugged in the first one, and saw that it contained the NFS game. I plugged in second one and saw that it contained the proper XP installation files. I happily booted the system from the CD and formatted the entire C drive, hoping to install XP. Halfway through the installation, I realized that I hadn’t written down the product key, which had been scribbled on the disk. I crossed my fingers and removed the disk and tried to write down the 25-digit product key, when I realized that I would have a long night ahead.

I couldn’t read what was written on it!!

It had been scribbled so badly that most of the letters (numbers?) were not easily made out. I tried different combinations – there was one particular letter that could have been an ‘H”, an “M’, an ‘N’ or an ‘A’.

I tried all these combinations, and none of them worked. There were 5 letters that were doubtful, and the number of combinations of these five letters came up to 349, according to my poor math prowess. So, I abandoned the effort and sent my brother out to his friend’s place to get another copy of the XP installation disk. I had to bribe him to go! The terrorist! Bah!

Well, he did finally and when I tried to install XP with this disk (thankfully, the product key was clearly written), the installation crashed halfway, claiming that the disk was corrupt and couldn’t be read. I was very close to pulling my hair out when the power went out and I was bathed in darkness. For fear of scaring my neighbor’s kid into having horrible nightmares, I held my scream of agony within me.

Half an hour later, the power came back and I decided to go to one of my .. um.. cousinfriend‘s place to collect another disk.

“Come, macha! I have XP!” said the moron excitedly into the phone. Poor guy, I thought. He sounded so excited over the phone that I thought that he was on top of the world because someone had called him! 😀

I drove to his place (it was almost 9.30 in the night) and went inside. He held out a DVD in his hand and said, “Macha, this is Vista! Try it! It’s better then XP!” :I

……….

I had half a mind to throttle the poor thing and relieve him of his miserable existence. “I already have Vista, dude. I need XP,” I said.

“Oh, I don’t have XP, man,” he said. There was a heavy flower vase on the table that looked really promising. Controlling my homicidal instincts, I said good night and left. Back home, I decided to give the damn thing one last try with a few other permutations of the doubtful product key. I switched on the machine, and got an error message, which said, “Boot Sector Fail. Press Any Key To Continue”

I pressed a key, and the computer shut itself down. It’s now a paperweight that looks like a computer.

Why do such things happen only to me?? Such a simple thing and I get into these weird messes that I don’t know what sin I had committed to deserve such treatment.

…and again!! I don’t know which side of the bed I woke up yesterday, but I’m never going to do it again, hopefully! My day wasn’t all that bad, actually, but for some reason or the other, I got cursed seven times!! Seven different people in seven different situations cursed me with some unspeakable pejoratives! There was a movie, where someone asks, “If you are called a jerk seven times, do you actually become a jerk?”

If the answer to this question is true, then I don’t know what I’ve become now!! Here’re the situations, as best as I can remember them, and I’ll let you decide whether I deserved all the colorful language hurled at me.

1. Late afternoon, I was riding my bike in heavy traffic and singing a romantic song, thinking of my girlfriend, and gleefully unaware of the honking and tensions all around, when all of a sudden, a lunatic auto rickshaw careened out of the corner and scraped my front fender. I’m not a person who loses his temper, and as long as I’m not hurt or my wallet is not hurt (read as, bike screwed) I don’t care. So, I just whipped out my middle finger at the auto driver and continued my singing. This guy, I don’t know why, he popped his head out the vehicle and screamed, “Ninakkan!” and drove off. This word, in my language, has something to do with elder sisters and incest. I don’t have an elder sister, but still, I was kind of annoyed. I hadn’t raised my voice, only my finger, and I don’t think I deserved this insult!!

2. The second incident occurred when I was walking down the road from my office, with a breath mint in my mouth. I was rolling the piece of mint in my tongue, when I passed a mother and her small girl walk past me. Just then, my tongue made a smacking sort of a noise because of the piece of candy, which the mother mistook for something else. She turned around and glared at me and called me a pervert! I knew there was no point trying to reconcile. I just shrugged and moved on.

3, 4, 5. The next three instances happened almost simultaneously. I was in my friend’s place in the evening, watching the cricket match and munching some peanuts, when three of my other friends walked in. They said the following things to me:Friend 1:“Hey asshole! How’s it hanging?”Friend 2:“You bastard! How’re you man!?”Friend 3: “Fucking moron! Long time no see!!”

6. Just when I was about to sigh and resign to my fate of being cursed all day long, there was an ad running on TV, which screamed out, “Nikhil’s a loser!” I mean, why couldn’t the ad feature some other name? If they wanted to portray a loser, then why choose a name like Nikhil?? Not fair!! 😦

7. Lastly, when I realized that my day had been extremely weird and that I’d been cursed enough number of times, things just got worse. While driving back home from my friend’s place, late at night, I was whistling to myself, when I stopped at a red light. I was still whistling, when I heard a scream of anger from next to me. There was a couple on a bike, the man driving and the woman sitting behind him, and both of them glaring at me and the guy was about to take his helmet off. He said, “You pervert! Stop eying my girl!”

I lost my temper a bit. Just a bit. I was about to open my mouth to retort when the lights changed and the guy flipped a finger at me and drove off at full speed.

I started thinking on my way back, that maybe its not a good idea to sing or whistle when driving. Maybe its something else altogether. I don’t know. I’ve been wronged and I demand justice!! 😀